The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States is hammering out its final report and the facts are downright appalling. If one can thank God for anything on that September morning, it is that the commercial airliner ordered shot down by National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United Statesdidn’t actually exist. And neither, apparently, did Saddam’s involvement in the assault. The White House continues to insist on linkage between Iraq and Al Qaeda; a meeting between hijacker Mohammad Atta and an unnamed Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague on April 9, 2001 remains the centerpiece of their assertion. Yet according to the 9/11 panel, “Based on the evidence available – including investigation by Czech and U.S. authorities plus detainee reporting – we do not believe such a meeting occurred.” In fact, cell-phone records definitively place Atta in Florida at the time. According to CIA sources, the 9/11 ringleader was either casing naval installations or getting drenched at Disneyworld’s Typhoon Lagoon.

The Vice President performed his own act – the liar’s tightrope – on CNBC last week. After being challenged that he had previously stated the alleged meeting was “pretty well confirmed,” Cheney retorted, “Never said that… absolutely not.” Yet during a December 9, 2001 installment of “Meet the Press” the Veep said, “It’s been pretty well confirmed that he did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April.” Why does the administration continue this charade when everyone now knows that the reasons for invading Iraq have more to do with oil than with terrorism?

In a garbled attempt at productivity, the Senate last Tuesday radically increased fines up to $3 million a day for broadcasting indecent material. GOP Senator Sam Brownback, for one, was proud to safeguard a public increasingly resentful of base language, particularly “when people’s families are watching.” He crowed, “We’re going to have to take action because the broadcasters won’t police themselves.” Moments later, Vice President Cheney sidled up to Pat Leahy, and told the Vermont Senator, “Go fuck yourself.” I guess Republicans are exempt from the moral code they are steadfastly trying to impose on the rest of the nation. Pious folks like Illinois Senatorial candidate Jack Ryan who forced his wife to perform at sex clubs or Connecticut Governor John Rowland who resigned while being impeached for doling out government contracts in return for gifts.

Such high-mindedness, though, could come back to bite the administration in the ass. With woefully inadequate troop levels, the Army again expanded stop loss orders preventing military personnel from leaving service at the end of their enlistment. But the Pentagon’s “don’t ask, don’t tell policy” means any soldier, like bomb squad leader Brian Muller, can catch the next plane home by coming out of the closet to his CO. 770 people received the homosexual discharge (no, this is not a urethral drip) last year, while in 2001 – as deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan was gearing up – 1,227 were given the boot. So now, anyone who is sick of getting shot at in Mosul or An Najaf can simply invite their sarge to a dinner of roasted goat, braised artichokes, and KY jelly.

The war on terror took a turn for the worse when the Supreme Court ruled in two parallel cases that neither foreigners nor Americans could be indefinitely held as “enemy combatants” without access to the judicial system. Clearly disappointed with the rulings, Mr. Bush said of the high court, “these are barbaric people.” Opening up a floodgate of lawsuits from Guantanamo Bay, Sandra Day O’Connor proffered that a state of war “is not a blank check for the president,” adding that due process cannot simply be vacated “during this time of ongoing combat.” Her opinion in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld admonishes, “that our calculus not give short shrift to the values that this country holds dear or to the privilege that is American citizenship.”

The following evening, while enjoying a choice cut of Mad Cow at The Capital Grille, Justice O’Connor was accosted by Dick Cheney who told her, “Go fuck yourself.” Diners recall that Cheney was still glowing over the surreptitiously early handover of Iraqi sovereignty and the remanding of Saddam to local authorities. As if these events will get us out of country in the foreseeable future. Fifty years after “the end of major combat operations” in Korea we’ve still got troops on the peninsula. It’s a safe bet that without the KY, our boys won’t be coming home anytime soon.